With Bloomberg’s agenda blocked in Congress, Everytown is trying to achieve incremental steps toward gun registration in states that it thinks are most vulnerable to its deceptions.

As part of its campaign for background checks on private firearm sales, Everytown for Gun Safety is using Vermont as a laboratory, claiming, “in the 21st century, gun-owning Vermonters also go online, to a growing number of websites where anonymous buyers and sellers exchange firearms.”

As usual, when it comes to what gun control supporters say, a reality check is in order. Federal law has a lot to say about transfers of firearms, including between people who are not firearm dealers. These same laws apply regardless of how the transactions are arranged.

Federal law prohibits transferring a firearm to anyone known or reasonably believed to be prohibited from possessing a firearm. It prohibits shipping or mailing a firearm to a person who is not a dealer and who is a resident of another state. It prohibits a non-dealer from selling a firearm to a non-dealer who is a resident of another state, without going through a dealer. And it prohibits transferring a handgun to anyone under the age of 18.

Federal law also prohibits anyone from being engaged in the business of dealing in firearms without having a Federal Firearm License (FFL). This brings us to Everytown’s admission that it “contracted an investigative agency to post ads offering firearms for sale [in Vermont] on the website Armslist.com. Between July 28 and October 9, investigators placed 24 ads.” Anybody else who offered to sell that many firearms in that span of time without an FFL might well expect to attract the negative attention of law enforcement.